The present disclosure relates to communications systems, and more specifically to systems and methods for pointing an antenna.
A directional antenna is typically aligned upon deployment to the location the antenna is to be used. An installer may attach a support structure of the antenna to an object (e.g., ground, a building or other structure, etc.) and carry out a pointing process to point the beam of the antenna towards a target antenna (e.g., on a geostationary satellite, etc.). The pointing process may include loosening bolts on a mounting bracket on the back of the antenna and physically moving the antenna until sufficiently pointed at the target using a signal metric (e.g., signal strength) of a signal communicated between the antenna and the target. Once sufficiently pointed, the installer may tighten the bolts to immobilize the mounting bracket.
Although the antenna may be considered “sufficiently” pointed, the gain of the beam in the direction of the target antenna may be less than the boresight direction of maximum gain of the beam. This may for example be due to manual pointing accuracy limitations, and/or a relatively low requirement for considering when the pointing is sufficient in order to account for location-dependent signal metric variation. In addition, once sufficiently pointed, the direction of the beam of the antenna may shift slightly as the installer locks down the mounting bracket. Furthermore, the antenna may remain in service for a long time after installation. Over this time, several influences can cause the antenna to move and thus change the direction of the beam. For example, the mounting bracket may slip, the object on which the antenna is mounted can shift slightly, there may be an impact to the antenna (e.g., a ball striking the antenna), etc.
The misalignment between the boresight direction of the beam of the antenna and the direction of the target antenna cause pointing errors that can have a significant detrimental effect on the quality of the link between the antenna and the target. Small misalignment may be compensated for by reducing a modulation and coding rate of signals communicated between the antenna and the target. However, to maintain a given data rate (e.g., bits-per-second (bps), this approach may increase system resource usage and thus result in inefficient use of the resources. In addition, after installation it may be difficult to determine whether performance degradation is due to misalignment of the antenna or some other cause. Diagnosing degraded performance may require rolling a truck to the location of the antenna so a technician can determine the cause and attempt to correct it, which increases costs for managing the system.